NYC Parks Renamed in Honor of the Black Experience

Sign up for our acclaimed free weekday newsletter Editorially Black

Get the top Racial Equity stories of the day from America’s most influential oldest continuously published Black newspaper, serving the nation’s largest Black and brown community. Sign up to stay connected.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and First Lady Chirlane McCray were on hand to rename two sections of St. Nicholas Park in Harlem. The expansive lawn and playground will now be called the James Baldwin Lawn and Langston Hughes Playground, respectively.

Baldwin was a native New Yorker known for chronicling the Black experience in books like, “The Fire Next Time,” “If Beale Street Could Talk,” and many others.

Hughes was a leader of the Harlem Renaissance and wrote extensively about the Black experience.

The rededication is part of a larger effort to rename public parks in New York City to honor the Black experience.